Top 100 Jeanette Winterson Quotes
#1. Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.
Jeanette Winterson
#2. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open
the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
Jeanette Winterson
#3. We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.
Jeanette Winterson
#4. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you.
Jeanette Winterson
#5. Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.
Jeanette Winterson
#6. Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie.
Jeanette Winterson
#8. What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.
Jeanette Winterson
#10. There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.
Jeanette Winterson
#11. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough
Jeanette Winterson
#12. I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive ...
I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
#13. As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.
Jeanette Winterson
#14. The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
Jeanette Winterson
#15. What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.
Jeanette Winterson
#16. How long before the shouting starts? How long before the tears and the accusations and the pain? That specific stone n the stomach pain when you lose something you haven't got round to valuing? Why is the measure of love loss?
Jeanette Winterson
#17. You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?
Jeanette Winterson
#18. I am not interested in genres. I am interested in doing the best work I can in whatever medium.
Jeanette Winterson
#19. The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.
Jeanette Winterson
#20. I will do whatever I have to do to reach people with the things I believe are important. Life is too short not to do everything you can.
Jeanette Winterson
#21. I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.
Jeanette Winterson
#22. And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.
Jeanette Winterson
#23. Atlas said, 'Must my future be so heavy?'
Hera said, 'That is your present, Atlas. Your future hardens every day, but it is not fixed.'
'How can I escape my fate?'
'You must choose your destiny.
Jeanette Winterson
#24. I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way.
Jeanette Winterson
#25. This is the city of uncertainty, where routes and faces look alike and are not. Death will be like that. We will forever be recognizing people we have never met. But darkness and death are not the same. One is temporary, the other is not.
Jeanette Winterson
#26. I think of myself in a continuum as a woman. Two hundred years ago, it would have been very difficult for me to write at all.
Jeanette Winterson
#27. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.
Jeanette Winterson
#30. One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.
Jeanette Winterson
#31. Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.
Jeanette Winterson
#32. I stretched out my hands, holding the falling sun in one hand, and the climbing moon in the other, my silver and gold, my gift from life. My gift of life. My life is a hesitation in time. An opening in a cave. A gap for a word.
Jeanette Winterson
#33. Although I sometimes pose as a fight animal, I'm really a flight animal.
Jeanette Winterson
#34. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me.
Jeanette Winterson
#35. Are you like all other men after all? The poor should have no justice, just as they have no food, no decent shelter, no regular livelihood? Is that how your saviour Jesus treated the poor?
Jeanette Winterson
#36. Today we are all speeding under the golden arms of the arches into our city, into our lives, into the world that is a stream of information, ceaselessly collected and projected.
Jeanette Winterson
#37. When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.
Jeanette Winterson
#38. I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society.
Jeanette Winterson
#40. The power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.
Jeanette Winterson
#41. Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.
Jeanette Winterson
#42. I saw a lot of working class men and women - myself included - living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the church... The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning.
Jeanette Winterson
#46. And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.
Jeanette Winterson
#49. As he turned inwards she turned outwards, but while he wore his intensity like a garment, she slept in hers.
Jeanette Winterson
#50. Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
Jeanette Winterson
#51. Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing.
Jeanette Winterson
#52. Only humans can know what it means to strip a human being of being human.
Jeanette Winterson
#56. Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like
mercury then gathered up only at the last moment.
Jeanette Winterson
#57. I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.
Jeanette Winterson
#58. There are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.
Jeanette Winterson
#61. I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.
Jeanette Winterson
#63. They say every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Jeanette Winterson
#64. To create was a fundament, to appreciate, a supplement. Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.
Jeanette Winterson
#65. I have had a lot to put up with," she said, looking meaningfully at me. "I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.
Jeanette Winterson
#66. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself.
Jeanette Winterson
#67. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.
Jeanette Winterson
#68. Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it.
Jeanette Winterson
#69. I tried to copy my parents, as monkeys do, but they were trying to copy me, looking to the child for the energy and hope they had long since lost.
Jeanette Winterson
#70. Where you are born
what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own
stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.
Jeanette Winterson
#71. It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them.
Jeanette Winterson
#72. What they held was already inside me, and together we could get away. And standing over the smoldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. "Fuck it," I thought, "I can write my own.
Jeanette Winterson
#73. I don't care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that.
Jeanette Winterson
#74. Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I'm happy when I'm standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited.
Jeanette Winterson
#75. Because if you are raised on the Bible, you don't just walk away, whatever anybody says.
Jeanette Winterson
#76. I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.
Jeanette Winterson
#77. I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.
Jeanette Winterson
#78. The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.
Jeanette Winterson
#79. Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.
Jeanette Winterson
#80. The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.
Jeanette Winterson
#81. In the modern world there was so much safety that safety had become the chief source of danger.
Jeanette Winterson
#83. O change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.
Jeanette Winterson
#84. Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind.
Jeanette Winterson
#87. My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.
Jeanette Winterson
#88. Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.
Jeanette Winterson
#90. I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learned, forget them. Forget that you've been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.
Jeanette Winterson
#92. The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness.
Jeanette Winterson
#94. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she (Mrs Winterson) was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.
Jeanette Winterson
#95. Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries.
Jeanette Winterson
#96. Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living.
Jeanette Winterson
#98. The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.
Jeanette Winterson
#100. When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.
Jeanette Winterson
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